Friday, January 10, 2014

#Wikidata - #Chemistry data

Many facts are known about a compound like benzene. As a result benzene is known in many databases. These databases are relevant enough to provide the identifiers in Wikipedia info-boxes. One of the challenges in the English Wikipedia is to ensure that all these identifiers are verified and not vandalised.

At this time there are sixty nine articles about benzene. All of them could be served with the same information from Wikidata. It is even easier to make sure that information is not tampered with. There are no small textual changes. With so many external sources to pick from it should be possible to write software that compares any of these values with these external sources.

Such software can be used to monitor against vandalism as well. At some point Wikidata may have such high quality data that external sources will verify their data against what is known at Wikidata.
Thanks,
GerardM